According to an unreliable source

 According to an unreliable source 

A letter from Uncle Albert arrived in this morning’s mail. The reader may recall that while he writes emails to everyone else, his cretin congressman, his stabenovic senior senator, the whiners at CNN, and the blowhards at Fox (his terms), he writes only letters to me.

     This begins as usual, “Ah, my favorite nephew!” then launches directly into the matter at hand.

I was thinking last night when I went to bed about my old friend and mentor, Giancarlo Fellini, no relation to the filmmaker but a childhood friend of Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII. Or so he claimed, because my Fellini could hardly have been old enough. He certainly wasn’t in his eighties when I studied with him in Paris during my sabbatical in the fall of 1958 – when the pope died.

Pius XII by m ball

But Fellini claimed to have been such a close friend that he often visited Genio, as he called him, at various papal residences. “I told him in 1954,” Fellini told me once: “I told him: ‘You’re a sick man. And it’s your own damn fault. But you need to resign. You need to leave Italy. You need to leave Europe. I see two good choices for you: Go to Mexico and crawl on your knees from Ameca to meet the Virgin at Talpa de Allende. Or, retire to Polynesia, take a mistress, father many children, and die of the clap.’ You can see he didn’t take my advice, and you can see what happened as a result.”

The result was that the pope didn’t die of the clap – at least not clap that he picked up in Polynesia; rather he did die “in a huge stink and bother” and only “after years of stink and bother already," or so Fellini.

     “He got sicker and sicker under the care of that minuscule quack Galazzi-Lisi and the other one, the German, whose ‘rejuvenation treatment’ only revived Genio’s childhood nightmares, full of demons so chilling that not even the ‘maid,’ Josefina, could keep him warm at night, not that she was any Abishag the Shunemite, by then almost as withered an old crone as he was a matusa.

     “But il qua qua Galazzi-Lisi wasn’t done. Assisted by that matto Nuzzi from Naples, he had poor, already-rotting Genio, embalmed three times – for the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one must suppose – each time with an oil more putrid than the last until the oil of the Spirit, thinking itself gas, exploded, and the bits and pieces of the body of his holiness had to be gathered, separated – poorly no, doubt – from the sick of the Swiss Guards attending him and the whole mélange ladled into first of the three matryoshka boxes – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – popes are buried in, gathered and three-times encased so they could parade ‘him’ through the streets of Rome before burying his mess as deep as they dared in St. Peter’s bowels.”

There it ends, Uncle Albert's letter, as abruptly as it began, though with the usual closing: “Your poor dead mother’s ancient friend . . .” and his signature, Albert.

Apparently, no lessons are to be drawn. Good!

08.29.16